Contribution of post colonial litureture

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22 November 2016
Contribution of Post-Colonial Literature
The Europeans traveled to many distant lands, with Australia being the farthest away. As they always did, these colonists took the land away from the natives and subjugated the land. It is process repeated repeatedly throughout the world. When the natives resisted, they were tortured and killed as a warning to other natives. It is the conquering way for all Europeans. The natives in all lands were settled by Europeans, the facts overwrote the history annals because only the Europeans knew how to read and write. The colonization cost more in lives of the natives than money. The natives depended on handing down history from father to son by word of mouth. This provides an account of Australian’s Aborigine with the Europeans being the good people. These next paragraphs will compare and contrast the historical significance of “The Secret River” from three scholars, Sue Kossew, Sarah Pinto, and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, respectively.
All three authors discuss the Secret River as the River of Blood. It is the blood of the natives, which run in that river. Those who would write about the history of Australia did so from a white European view of the world (Kossew, 15). They were the only ones who knew how to read and write back then. The Secret River was a semi-historical novel that depicts the natives as slaves, working for the Europeans. They simply did not get a choice in the matter (Pinto, 192). The real history of the natives passed on from father to son, unlike the Europeans.

This means the written view is European and not native. So who is telling the truth, no one, everyone? The truth is subjective to the author, who may or may not take liberties with perspective (Probyn-Rapsey, 71).
One thing all authors agree on is that the Europeans slaughtered the natives. The European settlers reacted violently, without a care or thought about family and children. Hence, the Secret River became the River of Blood because of the Europeans, in the name of the current conquering ruler of Australia, slaughtered indigenous people as if they were vermin. It really was a matter of perspective from the conquerors and the conquered. It this case the natives lost and to the Europeans, their opinion simply did not count or documented accurately.
In summary, the Europeans came and took over the land, effectively pushing out the natives. The Europeans rebuffed any resistance in the form of subjugation or death for those who resisted. It is a case of culture clash between two groups totally opposite in nature. This ultimately ended in a massacre, but this fact never written in the history books (Kossew, 16). According to Probyn-Rapsey (8), “The Secret River draws on complicity to contextualize its critique of culture in historical justice.” The Europeans destroyed the natives in what modern day historians would call mob violence, and all over assumptions, and not the facts. The Europeans savagely eliminated the natives or made them second-class citizens when they got in the way of progress. The indigenous people had their own cultures and beliefs and their history passed by word of mouth and depicted quite differently from the European version. This is a classic situation repeated across the world wherever the Europeans decided to settle. It is the way of the world in modern history, just as it was when the Europeans chose to settle in Australia. The Europeans ruled over the natives, documenting history as they saw it. That does not mean it was accurate or fair, those who can read and write decide what goes into the history book.
Works Cited
Kossew, Sue, Voicing the ”Great Australian Silence” Kate Grenville’s Narrative of Settlement in
The Secret River, the Journal of Commonwealth Literature 2007 42: 7 Web 21 November 2016
Pinto, Sarah, Emotional histories, and historical emotions: Looking at the past in historical
Novels School of Historical and European Studies, La Trobe University Vol. 14, No. 2, 2010,
189-207 Web 21 November 2016
Probyn-Rapsey, Fiona, Complicity, Critique, and Methodology Web 21 November 2016